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A Patched Map of IdentityMirjam Bruck-Cohen totally identifies with the textile medium, even though she is fully cognizant of the fact the medium is historically negligent in the Israeli art scene, and of the fact that it is almost completely absent from the range of the contemporary local discourse. Work with the textile medium can be total if it acknowledges the lost identity and the place of the woman who found a language to serve her for speech.For Mirjam, it is first and foremost a genealogical identity joining a continuity of ancestors from the various branches of her family, who worked with textiles, going back for generations. Mirjam found in her family makers of taliths, a court seamstress, and even tailors whose trade became a family name kleermaker. The latter include her grandparents, who founded a factory for umbrellas and parasols, on the eve of WWII. According to Mirjam, she was naturally drawn to textile since childhood (genetic memory?) and identified herself as a person, as a woman, and as a carrier of an emotionally charged biography, in the medium of textile. The range of possibilities offered by the textile, loaded with bodily and neural sensitivity, directed her art work from a position of intimacy towards a discussion of private and political identities. The textile as an perishable organic material, reacting to changes of light and weather, carried for her a human aspect, fragile but surprisingly survivable. Mirjam lives the day to day dimension of the material, its being near the body and usable, simple and accessible, crossing historical time, geographical space, and having its roots in the dawn of civilization. As a woman, Mirjam sees herself as a link in a long chain of women who lived the textile, for whom it was the sole sphere of expression for centuries, their voices unheard. During the early 90s textile served for Mirjam, as a loaded position from which to confront her biography as a refugee child during WWII. Those art works, |
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